Spotted in Texas. pic.twitter.com/cShcU8NxgP
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) January 11, 2019
Tag Archives: politics
Ayn Rand Reviews Children’s Movies
“If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.” https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/ayn-rand-reviews-childrens-movies
Why Americans Work So Much Despite Economist John Maynard Keynes’s Prediction
The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn’t exactly how things have played out. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/
Anil Dash discusses the biases of tech on The Ezra Klein Show
Blogging and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash: “Marc Andreessen famously said that ‘software is eating the world,’ but it’s far more accurate to say that the neoliberal values of software tycoons are eating the world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lupS5SkSk0
The Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past
Journalism is returning to the 19th Century, where the news was hyperpartisan. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/post-advertising-future-media/578917/
Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common: ‘I see no way out.’
People living paycheck-to-paycheck include professors, real estate agents, farmers, business executives, computer programmers and store clerks. Four Americans in 10 say they couldn’t produce $400 in an emergency without incurring debt or selling something. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/28/living-paycheck-paycheck-is-disturbingly-common-i-see-no-way-out/
The One Issue the Left and Right Can Agree On
Progressives and conservatives, including Tucker Carlson and Goldman Sachs, agree that monopolies are pernicious. https://newrepublic.com/article/152680/one-issue-left-right-can-agree
The Blacklist: Lena Horne + Paul Robeson
During the Communist witch-hunts, Lena Horne was forced to choose between her career and her friendships — including her relationship with her mentor and friend Paul Robeson, the “singer, actor and political firebrand.” [You Must Remember This podcast] http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2016/5/16/stormy-weather-lena-horne-paul-robeson-blacklist-episode-12
AOC just quoted the Watchmen comic/movie
To quote Alan Moore: “None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.” 🤣 https://t.co/8TCmKNJlkD
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 11, 2019
I so, so love AOC right now.
Some of my (older, male) moderate Democrat friends scoff at her. She’s young, she’s brash, she doesn’t have a record of accomplishments, some of her policy ideas are crazy.
This is missing the point. She’s smart, she’s pulled off an electoral coup, she inspires people and gives them energy. Sure, she’s young and has a lot to learn. And I hope she has a long, successful political career ahead of her in which to learn it. AOC for President … in 2039!
Also, Nancy Pelosi is tough as nails and I so, so love her too right now. She is the person that we thought Hillary Clinton was.
The country can have both AOC and Pelosi. The country NEEDS AOC and Pelosi.
Also, all the national politicians I’m inspired about right now are women. Certainly not Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer is the nerdy kid who talks a good game about standing up to the bully when he’s alone with his nerdy friends playing Dungeons and Dragons. And then in the playground Chuck gives the bully his lunch money even BEFORE the bully asked for it. Feh on Chuck Schumer.
National political men, presumably you have balls. Use them for something other than rubbing up against interns.
Trump’s Border Wall is a Vortex of Stupidity that Trump and the GOP Can’t Escape
The Wall started as an applause line at Trump’s campaign rallies, and has morphed into one of the dumbest policy debates in the history of American politics. [Christopher Hooks] https://www.texasobserver.org/trumps-border-wall-is-a-vortex-of-stupidity-that-trump-and-the-gop-cant-escape/
Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter deliver scathing criticisms of American capitalism. Yes, Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter
Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.
America’s “ruling class,” Carlson says, are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.” He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”
[Jane Coaston] https://www.vox.com/2019/1/10/18171912/tucker-carlson-fox-news-populism-conservatism-trump-gop
Beyond universal background checks: Democrats need to go bigger on guns
Background checks alone don’t significantly reduce gun violence. [German Lopez] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/9/18171909/universal-background-checks-hr-8-gun-violence-democrats
Trump’s Wall — Texans Vow to Stop Government from Seizing Land
Texas landowners on Mexican border are vowing to fight the federal government should it invoke eminent domain to seize their property to build Trump’s wall. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/texans-fight-to-stop-government-from-seizing-land-for-border-wall/
Sarah Sanders defended Trump’s wall fight using an argument conservatives normally hate
Conservatives are betraying their own principles by defending the border wall. It’s a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle that addresses an imaginary crisis. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/9/18175451/sanders-border-wall-conservative-gop-trump-argument
How Robert A. Heinlein went from socialist to libertarian
Jeet Heer discusses Heinlein’s political transformation in a 2014 essay on the New Republic. Heinlein was a socialist in the 1930s who flirted with the John Birch society in the 1950s, and became a Goldwater supporter in the 60s and a staunch libertarian thereafter.
As a young man, Heinlein supported himself through government assistance after being discharged from the Navy with a disability. In later life, he spoke out against “loafers” and the welfare state.
(What is it about prominent libertarians receiving government assistance? Heinlein, Ayn Rand, and I believe there were one or two others.)
The turning point came in 1957. After that year, Heinlein’s books were no longer progressive explorations of the future but hectoring diatribes lamenting the decadence of modernity. A recurring character in these books—variously named Hugh Farnham, Jubal Harshaw or Lazarus Long—is a crusty older man who’s a wellspring of wisdom. “Daddy, you have an annoying habit of being right,” runs an actual bit of dialogue from Farnham’s Freehold (1964). In the worst of Heinlein’s later books, daddy not only knows best, he often knows everything….
Heinlein described some of his books as being “Swiftian” in intent. Regrettably, Heinlein lacked the rhetorical control of the Gulliver’s Travels author. Aside from a 1941 Yellow Peril novel, Heinlein had a strong record as a critic of racism. But in Farnham’s Freehold, Heinlein wanted to use inversion to show the evils of ethnic oppression: he took a middle-class white family and, via a nuclear explosion, threw them into a future where Africans rule the earth and enslave whites. So far, so good. Yet Heinlein’s Africans aren’t just a master race, they also castrate white men, make white women their concubines, and eat white children (white teenage girls being especially tasty). Preaching against racism, Heinlein resurrected some of the most horrific racial stereotypes imaginable. Farnham’s Freehold is an anti-racist novel only a Klansman could love.
Heer doesn’t fully explore the weird sloppiness of “Farnham’s Freehold.” One of the characters in “Farnham’s Freehold,” which came out in the 1960s, is a young African-American working as a house-servant to the hero’s family, the Farnhams. The young man is working his way through college and an accounting degree. Farnham lectures the young man on racism; the young man tells Farnham to STFU until Farnham has ridden a bus through the south as an African-American man.
And the African civilization of the future is a highly advanced, highly technological civilization. The Farnhams’ master always speaks respectfully to the hero and treats Farnham kindly — by the standards of his day. Heinlein knew that some brutal civilizations were also highly advanced; the Romans and Spartans were certainly no pussycats.
But yeah cannibalism stealing white men’s wives WTF?
There is a streak of American ethnocentrism, which is central to today’s culture, that holds that all races and ethnicities are genetically equal but Anglo-American culture is the pinnacle of civilization. Asians, Africans, Jews and other non-Europeans can become good Americans if their cultural heritage is overwritten with the proper Anglo-European model. In its extreme form in the 19th Century you saw American Indian boys kidnapped from their parents and put in military schools designed to make them white; the motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
In its extreme form this is deplorable behavior — and yet it’s isn’t that the way the American melting pot works? I myself am a product of this process; my grandparents were Eastern European Jews who spoke Yiddish as their first language and heavily accented English. I’m an American who speaks only a few words of Yiddish, most of which I picked up from Neil Simon plays and such. And I am entirely pleased with that outcome.
Melting pot culture holds that everybody talks and acts the same, with a slight bit of variation for ethnic heritage. If you want a visual image, think of a Sikh man serving in the military: Turban, beard, and otherwise standard American uniform.
Heinlein and other science fiction of that period definitely corresponds to that school of ethnocentrism. In midcentury science fiction, Earth-people mapped to white Americans, and alien races were stand-ins for other races and nationalities of Earth. You see it in Star Trek too; the Federation and Starfleet are American-like institutions; other races, both human and alien, are free to participate so long as they act like white Americans. Even the aliens wear uniforms that look like human clothes.
Trump calls wall only solution to ‘growing humanitarian crisis’ at border
“President Trump delivered a forceful and fact-challenged televised plea to the nation Tuesday night for his long-promised border wall, declaring “a growing humanitarian and security crisis” at the southern border…. ” [Philip Rucker and Felicia Sonmez] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-declares-a-growing-humanitarian-crisis-at-the-border-in-demand-for-wall-funding-to-end-shutdown/2019/01/08/bdd2767e-1368-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html?utm_term=.49497dd15a4f
Trump is a lying piece of garbage. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than other residents. That’s true of both legal and illegal immigrants.
Also, in a sane universe, the response to a “growing humanitarian crisis” is sending food, shelter, and medical aid. If you’re a piece of garbage like Trump, you want to build a wall so people can suffer elsewhere, and so you and your criminal cronies can make profit from the contracting fees.
A normal person sees a suffering child and wants to mitigate that suffering. Trump sees a suffering child, takes that child from their parents, and puts the child in a cage. Because they’re profit in being a cage contractor.
The Blacklist: The Trials of the Hollywood Ten
In 1947, ten “unfriendly” witnesses refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about Communism in Hollywood. They believed the Constitution would protect them. http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/blacklist-hollywood-ten
NVIDIA created this AI-generated interactive cityscape that you can drive through
And at the end, one of the researchers creates a video of his partner dancing. That’s chilling — imagine what our friends the Russians could do with that technology for fake news.
After Loss to Feinstein, de León May Seek California Democratic Party Chair
State Sen. Kevin de León of Los Angeles, who failed to unseat Dianne Feinstein in November, is considering running for chair of the state Democratic Party. https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2019/01/06/after-loss-to-feinstein-de-leon-may-seek-california-democratic-party-chair/
President Trump Commits to ‘Less Obtrusive’ Steel Border Fence
We’ve gone from build a wall and Mexico will pay for it, to build a fence and the American taxpayers will get stuck with the bill. https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2019/01/06/president-trump-commits-to-less-obtrusive-steel-border-fence/
If Trump thinks migrants in the U.S. illegally are dangerous, why has he hired so many of them?
Trump the hypocrite warns illegal immigrants are rapists and murderers, but he’s happy to hire them — including one who prepares his own meals. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-2-enter-the-fray-if-trump-thinks-undocumented-migrants-1546619872-htmlstory.html
Right-wing blowhards are having a tough time with this whole women-in-power thing in Congress
Wingnuts are losing their shit because women in Congress swear and dance. Heavens, it’s shocking. [Virginia Heffernan] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-heffernan-ocasio-cortez-and-misogyny-20190104-story.html
Doris Kearns Goodwin on how great Presidents are made
How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success
With “The Apprentice,” TV producer Mark Burnett mythologized Trump — then a floundering D-lister — as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency. [Patrick Radden Keefe] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success
An outstanding profile. Keefe notes that Trump and Burnett are kindred spirits. However, Burnett really is a successful businessman. Trump is a fraud, who arguably modeled his current image on Burnett.
A theme for 2019
On the Cortex podcast, CGP Grey and Myke Hurley like having “themes” rather than resolutions. https://www.relay.fm/cortex/79
I like that so much I adopted the idea for myself.
My theme for 2019 is value my time. And just within the last 48 hours I walked away from two political arguments on social media. Progress!